THE NEW YORKER poems was "The Whole of Harmo- nium." Above all, he was loyal to the inviolate conception of literature he formed before this century began: "Is literature really a profession? Can you single it out, or must you let it decide in you for itself? I have determined upDn one thing, and that is not to try to suit anybody except myself." His daughter has shown loyalty in turn by becoming her father's editor. This is the third volume that she has seen into the press; the two others are the "Letters of Wallace Stevens" ( 1966) and the paperback anthology "The Palm at the End of the Mind" (1972). She brings to her custodianship a love and care more than scholarly, and in this instance has had to invent a way of presenting her variegated, fragment- ed material. "Souvenirs and Prophe- . " . 1 b k " . I cles IS an unusua 00 - a sIngu ar collation," one might say, quoting the I line after the line in "The Comedian as the Letter C" from which the title is taken: He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena, And, being full of the caprice, inscribed Commingled souvenirs and prophecies. He made a singular collation. Neither biography nor anthology, this volume-uniform with Knopf's hand- some editions of Stevens and a balanc- , ing opposite to "Opus Posthumous," edited by Samuel French Morse-es- sentially binds together Stevens' pre- 1915 poems, all of the journals that survived the mystenous slashing they < "", received, the bulk of Stevens' letters to his wife prior to their move to Hart- ford, a little of his undergraduate and journalistic prose, and such biographical facts and conjectures as were deemed helpful. In these last two categories, we wish for more. Stevens' prose firmed up long before his poetry, and we might have liked to read, from the Advocate, the "rather eerie story of a young man who takes a photograph of his sweet- heart to be framed; after it IS done and he opens the package, he finds a picture of himself," or, from the Tribune, the story composed, according to William Carlos Williams, in this manner: "Ste- vens sitting on a park bench at the Bat- tery watching the out tide and thinking to join it as a corpse . . . i\.s he sat there watching the debris floating past him he began to write-noting the various ar- ticles as they passed." His long New York period is tantalizing in the glimpses afforded, and one wonders if Miss Stevens, with more interviews and re- search, might have filled in at least the years after 1909. Our impression of the years before that is simultaneously of Stevens' immense capacity to suffer BY MAUPINTOUR GLORIES of Attica, the Peloponnese, and Thessaly toured in depth. 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